In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. ... [This memoir] collects the finest of this writing over four decades. ... She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging, our dream life popping into our conscious life, the mythic legacy of Princess Diana, the many themes that feed into her novels--revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England, and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him, she writes ... about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia"--